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FAQs

Handy reminders of how to do certain things with birdbox

Infrastructure

How do I redeploy a site?

If there are changes (and you want them to go live)

Pushing or merging to a specific git branch will trigger a build and deployment for the relevant service:

Branch Service What triggers it
main Dev PRs being merged
stage Staging Push to branch
prod Prod Push to branch

If there are no changes or I just want to restart

  1. In the relevant deployment pipeline repository for your site (e.g. mozilla-sre-deploy/deploy-newsite) go to Actions and select the relevant - e.g. Deploy Dev.

  2. Look for the Run Workflow button and trigger it for main1.

  3. This will start a deployment of a container based on the latest commit for the relevant branch (Dev: main, Staging: stage, Production: prod).

I've changed config for the site in webservices-infra: do I need to redeploy?

Yes.

I've changed a Secret: do I need to redeploy?

Yes.

Updated Secrets are immediately available in running pods, but you'll need to restart the Django/Wagtail container to get that to notice the new Secrets, and the way to do that is a redeployment.

How do I sign commits?

In order to merge PRs to websites-infra, you'll need signed git commits.

  • This document gives some context to what a signed commit means in Github.

  • This guide shows how to sign your commits with an SSH key.

How do I shell into a running pod

This is documented internally, but you'll need to know the cluster name(s), project ID and namespace(s) of your pods

How do I edit Secrets?

The infrastructure-setup stage will configure most of the secrets required for a Birdbox project such as DB, storage and email credentials that cannot to into a git repo.

Birdbox does need at least SSO/OIDC secrets to be set up by a developer. This is done via SRE's gsm.py helper.

How to I copy data between dev/stage/prod sites?

Currently, there is no automated way to do this. SRE may need to help you, if you don't already have appropriate access. If you do want to try this yourself, let @stevejalim know and he'll do his best to guide you.

To duplicate site content from, say, Prod to Dev:

  1. Get a SQL backup of Prod
  2. Download a copy of the media uploaded to the Prod cloud bucket
  3. Copy the assets into the Dev stage bucket
  4. Load the SQL into the Dev database
  5. Redeploy the Dev instance (with no code changes)
  6. In the Wagtail admin, go to Settings > Site and change the hostname to suit Dev.

CMS / Site

How do I do X in Wagtail?

How do I add CSS or JS to the project?

The CSS/JS build approach is based heavily on how Bedrock builds its assets (just without the concept of pre-defined bundles).

To add a new CSS or JS file:

  • Make a new source file in src/css/ or src/js/

  • In webpack.config.js, add to the entry map in module.exports:

    { ... "name-of-compiled-asset-styles": "./src/css/path/to/asset-source.scss", ... "name-of-compiled-asset-script": "./src/js/path/to/asset-source.es6", ... } * Now, when you're referring to the compiled asset (eg in frontend_media on a StructBlock or in a <link> or <script> tag in HTML) refer to the file with a .js or .css as appropriate:

  • css/name-of-compiled-asset-styles.css

  • js/name-of-compiled-asset-script.js

How do I configure the nav for a site?

See here.

See here.

  1. This trigger branch refers to the main branch of the pipeline code in deploy-newsite, not the birdbox-newsite application codebase. ↩